Debian Weekly News - February 23rd, 2000

Welcome to Debian Weekly News, a newsletter for the Debian developer
community.

Over 100 packages are in danger of being removed from Debian.
Richard Braakman posted a list of packages that are
headed for the Release Critical Bug Horizon and are due to be removed less
than a week from now if their bugs remain unfixed. Threatened package include
apache,
fetchmail,
gpm, and
samba. Already this has led to a
significant decrease in the size of the
Release Critical bug
list as people work to get bugs fixed on time. Perhaps the best example
of this work is this
project to fix all of openssh's bugs. However, the 28th still bodes
to be a very interesting and eventful day.

Elections for the next Debian Project Leader have opened, and will
close in two weeks. Developers can grab a ballot and
vote. Linux.com is posting interviews with the candidates, starting with an
interview of Ben
Collins.

Dale Scheetz posted a summary of what the New Maintainer
team is doing: work is progressing on the web site, backend database, and
Applicant's FAQ. The team is mostly done with writing an Applicant's
Checklist. Soon, they plan to "run a "test case" through the process to
shake out any issues", and then begin on the backlog of people who have
waited so long for new-maintainer to reopen. This should all happen within the
next few weeks.

Will Debian Alpha be fit for release with the rest of potato? David
Huggins-Daines raised a
number of concerns -- many packages cannot be built on alpha right now,
C++ programs have major problems, Debian Alpha is not binary-compatible with
Red Hat, and "in short, our system is in a mess due to circumstances
entirely beyond our control". David proposed that we revert to an older
version of egcs for Alpha, as it seems gcc is at the root of all these
problems.